Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"You got this habit of touching your arm," he said, which made her look at his bitten knuckles. "So that must be from the accident, huh?"

Before he could touch her arm, she pulled it away and sat back in her chair. He knew all about her scooter crash on Beretania Street. As he

lowered his head to see the burn scar on her calf from the exhaust pipe, she turned aside.

She could have done the same to him, talked about the finger he had smashed in a door. He said it "twinged" when he typed too long.

Sometimes it was his sign-off. Finger's throbbing. Or his feet — the "cookies" he put in his shoes for arch support. She understood his bad feet now. He was allergic to shellfish, too. He complained of carpal tunnel.

"So how's your mother?" he asked.

This was painful, such a question from a stranger.

"She's okay."

"I go past there almost every day."

Why had she told him about Arcadia, where her mother lived among old folks because of her stroke? As the youngest of the four children, but the only one still on the island, Daisy had been unable to care for her mother, and so Arcadia was the expensive answer — they all chipped in. He knew about that, this big strange man who went down Punahou Street and thought of her mother. It was a terrible mistake to log on late at night and lonely.

"I have to go," she said.

"We just got here!"

She had suspected that it would be hard to get away. He had hope. She had none.

"Hey, my father's not doing too good," he said.

Months before, on one of those late nights, when she had mentioned how badly she missed her father, he had commiserated, had quoted a poem he'd learned at school to her: my father moved through dooms of love. How could she cut him short now?

"It's the chemo," he said, making it into a Hawaiian name.

She didn't want to know more. She said, "They have these online support groups. I really have to go."

"There's about two hours before the news," he said.

Saying that was like a chess move. He was a chess player: he played against his computer and sometimes won. He knew how to be obstructive with a single move. He was reminding her that she watched the ten o'clock news every night.

"I figured we could watch the news together at my place."

The very idea of his thinking that terrified her so much she could not reply to it.

"What about your workout?" Hand weights, he had said. Treadmill. The Cardio Club.

"I'm taking a night off."

That was a lie. He had pretended to care about fitness, because she had. She had not expected muscles, but how about health? She didn't believe he scuba-dived at all.

He noisily suck-vacuumed the bottom of his glass with his straw and then tipped an ice cube into his mouth, cracking it like a nut, working it around his teeth.

She could not dislike him. He reminded her that messages were typed by people who had fat fingers, who were big and clumsy and hungry and lonely. She felt sorry for his failed first marriage, how he had caught his wife in bed with his best friend; sorry for the death of his brother, for his father's prostate cancer, the chemo. He treasured a memory of fishing with his father. His mother had sold advertising. She was German, sensitive about the war, but she had been a little kid then. Whenever I think about her death I can't stop crying. And more, much more. She knew everything about him.

All this was for someone else to care about, not her, and she regretted everything she had ever said to him. When he touched her with the hand he had been gnawing, she almost screamed. She wanted to leave before he touched her again with his bitten hand. Just his staring at her made her feel naked.

Not speaking — she couldn't — she got up and stiffly tried to go. But he stuck out his leg to block her.

"I know you think I'm a loser, but you're wrong. And you'll never get away."

She had started to cry. His voice caused it, the way he spoke. She had never imagined that his voice would sound like that, human and horrible. She thought, I know nothing about him. She was afraid.

"I'll find you." His knee against her made this emphatic, and all the chewing of his knuckles made the threat much worse. "I can find anyone on the Net."

When she finally got free of him she hurried to my office so I could sneak her out and make sure she was not followed. She told me the whole story, but that was only the beginning. He found her, found out where she worked, her telephone numbers. He called repeatedly. A temporary restraining order did no good.

He stalked her single-mindedly, as though she were the only woman in the world, and he loomed larger and uglier than any other man on earth.

A threat of legal action made him threaten to countersue for defamation. He harassed her for a full year, until she went to the mainland. Even then, with a new e-mail address, selecting Get Mail, she saw his ridiculous name attached to shrill disgusting messages to her, which she was obliged to download for the police, who did nothing about these foul things because she was on the mainland.

He attended her mother's funeral; she did not. But I was there, at her request, and saw him for the first time. He was tall and muscular and quite young, one of the handsomest men I had ever seen in my life.

In the way that Buddy had introduced me, he introduced Rain Conroy, a cousin from the mainland, to Royce Lionberg. "It's an emergency, Roy-boy."

A relative back in Sweetwater, hearing that Rain was going to Hawaii, said, "You've got to look up Buddy," and sent the girl on, knowing that Buddy would be amused. But Buddy's new wife, Pinky, became jealous. At first she refused to eat. She said, "I'm not hungry." Then she bit him on the arm, one of many such bites.

He said, "Hey, I thought you said you weren't hungry."

When he said that Rain was his cousin, Pinky became even more suspicious, and it seemed like further proof to Buddy that Filipinos were the incestuous bunch he often accused them of being.

Lionberg knew that Buddy was also a wealthy man and wanted nothing from him, and so he was a sympathetic listener to Buddy's woes — always unusual problems. On the telephone to Lionberg, Buddy said that in her fury, Pinky had locked herself in a closet and wouldn't come out.

"Did you say a closet?" Lionberg asked.

"Right. A clothes closet. Full of mothballs."

"How long has she been in it?"

"Day and a half."

"That's amazing," Lionberg said. He had an innocent fascination for that sort of chaos, because his own life was so orderly. "I wonder how long a person could stay in a closet?"

"I don't want to find out," Buddy said.

He said he would lose face with his Nevada relatives if he turned Rain away. Yet Pinky was becoming hysterical, whimpering in the darkness of the closet — or worse, keeping silent — with the door locked.

"I forced the door open this morning," Buddy said.

"Probably a good idea."

"She bit me again."

All this time Lionberg was laughing silently, glad that he was on the telephone and could hide his reaction.

"It's just for the weekend," Buddy said. "On Monday I'll pick her up and put her on the plane to the mainland."

Lionberg agreed, swallowing his laughter, because he was secure, happy, occupied with his bees and his garden and the huge house and walled compound that was his world.

He also knew when someone wanted to take advantage of him. Not Buddy — after all, this was a simple favor — but the girl, Rain. When he saw her he was certain that he would have to be careful.

She was in her early twenties, tall, slender, very pretty and selfpossessed. For all her delicacy she seemed strong — something about the way she hurried toward the ocean-facing hedge and looked down at the cove.